Up All Night with American Mary

Normally if I get home late, I sleep the moment I hit the sofa - or bed if I'm lucky - after my late night rum and coke under the stars. I am by inclination both a night owl and a morning lark, a lifestyle that it is always going to very tricksy to maintain, and a normally gruelling work schedule tends to put me into the lark category.

Because only larks have to get up at 530 am to cycle to work in a blue collar dump where hopes and dreams are slowly composted to nothing.

However, I'm on leave at the moment, and found myself last night as insomniac as I used to be when I was 20. I also had two new, well second hand actually, DVDs to watch from the market and decided to do some double ended candle burning to watch them.

"The Wicker Tree" came first, Robin Hardy's sort of follow up to the all time classic "The Wicker Man". I'm sure I've raved about that film often enough on here so I shan't go on about it, suffice to say that it must be rolling in its reputed M3 motorway foundation grave at how bad "The Wicker Tree" is.

Britannia Nicol tried to avoid "doing a Woodward"

Trashy chastity ringed country singer and boyfriend head to Scotland to convert some Pagans, and get caught up in Mayday rituals, with added unfunny comedy tone and breasts from someone who was in Foyle's war and in no way has Willow Magregor's allure. That's it. The film is dreadful, and if it does anything, it shows that the genius of "The Wicker Man" was down to Antony Shaffer's screenplay.

Summer is most definitely not "I-cumin-in"

That over and done with, I was still as awake as a moth on speed, so it was time to deploy "American Mary" on my eyes. As unwatchable at times as "The Wicker Tree", but for entirely different reasons, this film stars Katherine Isabelle, the wonderfully sneery-faced beauty of "Ginger Snaps" fame as a drug rape by her teachers leads her to abandon her medical studies for the world of aesthetic surgical body modification.

The Soska Sister's second film, after "Dead Hooker in a Trunk", the film establishes their brilliance as visualists and conceptualists of a new Cronenbergian Candadian horror, while showing that directing actors, and acting themselves, is not their strong point.

The Soska Sisters need some mods done

With its cast of Burlesque performers and tongue split Vancouver scenesters, the film has a rough and "out-there" tone balanced by the stylish corsets and medical fetish wear of Isabelle as the movie's protagonist. Indeed the movie's most alluring scene, that of Isabelle operating on the twins in black and red scrubs, is incredibly reminiscent of Cronenberg's Dead Ringers with the surgical near-performance art of Jeremy irons as the identical twin surgeons who lose their minds over a woman.

Surgery with style

The film, being what it is, suffers from bouts of awful acting and falls away badly towards its incredibly rushed ending. But the imagination and style behind it is so striking, it inspires you to search the depths of your own mind to see if you can think of anything conceptually better.

And so far, I haven't.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 16.09.14

The Spine

JG Ballard talks in the "Drowned World" how travelling down the spine is travelling back in time, back through evolution to the Jurassic, Triassic, Silurian...Devonian.

An injury to the spine takes you back in time, and forward too. It renders you helpless, a simple muscle pull leaving you an occasionally twinging, shrieking child or an elderly person spilling tea or soup down themselves as they sit down. A glimpse of hopeless past, helpless future, at the mercy of carers and family - if you have any.

Why are we still so vulnerable? We should have evolved past this flimsy calciferous entity within us, one that can paralyse us if it goes wrong. Should it now have been replaced with something constructed from carbon fibre or titanium alloy? Must we be a slave to this ironically invertebrate prawn like structure within us? 

Our livelihoods and basic functionality depend on this weak, vulnerable, hopeless thing? And we have to suffer the pain when it goes wrong?

Pah. I'm getting a new one...I shall make one myself. Maybe even lego is preferable to this.

Copyright  Bloody Mulberry 05.07.14

The Plague Man that I am

I can't remember when it started, this increasing set of blotches, scales and scabs advancing up my right ankle. I think once upon a time it was some harmless but distinctive dark splotches about ten years ago. Day followed day followed day, and soon, the area began to itch, a firey insistence to dig jagged nails into the flesh and scratch.

The satisfaction lasted barely seconds before that burning came back. I don't know what the cause was, for once, I never thought it was due to infection by scabies, parasites, noro-viruses seeking to reach my intestine through my skin. I knew it was excema or psoriasis or both, but a form so painful perhaps it had afflicted me from the stars, a passing Andromeda Strain as envisaged by Fred Hoyle, freeze dried alien contaminant blown in, on the space breezes, lodging itself into my bones.

It spread up, over the lumpy bone both up and down, onto foot and calf. It bled raw, no matter how much cream, oil, or coal tar found its way onto it, just like my hands, my horror gouged out hands only not just in winter.

Parts of it turned purple. Parts of it turned green, the unttractive green of the mould you find on bread after a few too many days in a hot sun in a sweating bag. Sometimes it would be hard to move the ankle, the scales of flesh were so dry and thick. In better periods, like now, it merely looks inflamed, witth the occasional eruption where it has bled.

This alien plague, et-excema, extra-excema, can only be controlled by steroids, cortisone, betnovate, the war zone moves up and down the botom of the limb like General Haig's front line in World War 1. But take the steroids away and the alien skin toxin is back in a weeping flash.

It is not just in my head that my body is at war.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 30.04.12

The Horrors of Catheterisation

Laid up, sick in every part of my body I was. I could lie half on my side in one precise, impossible to maintain position, that would stop me vomiting. Any other and I would hurl thick green bile out in to the charmless papier mache kidney bowls, as vomiting into a kidney will make you feel better.

I never dry heaved, as there was always some part of my stomach lining to tear out and disgorge, probably reaching down into starved duodenum. No food or liquid could be kept down

Veins had collapsed due to dehydration, re-acquiring line for fluid an endlessly painful series of stabs, infection setting in rapidly so the initial welcome coolness of the perfusing water was replaced by the hot inflammation of hungry bacteria. First patient opposite was dying, sharing a room with a nice old chap who's body was slowly shutting down. Second room-mate had a tracheotomy tube that spat out of the vagina like incision in his throat and bounced around the floor like a pen-top.

Defibs whining in the dead of night, woken too early. Could never rest. Forced upright for examinations, vomited immediately.

Through all of this my bladder would not function. The discomfort was unreal, underneath, alongside and above the nausea. I would drag a drip stand to the lavatory, begging for relief, and nothing.

The Emperor Tiberius, I recalled with no satisfaction, had executed men using a similar procedure. Sweating, near crying.

No relief.

I confessed all to the doctors. I had given up. I was now willing to undergo being touched; to undergo the most horrendous procedure I could think of.

Catheterisation.

Catherisation. The touching of my genitals by persons unknown, and then, the hideous, agonising violation by plastic tubing into my insides, a nightmare creature made to hurt men and women, and humiliate them, puking up my insides, puking out my bladder by force into some fucking bag, dangling at the end of my bed, symbol of internal failure, the young man so shit he couldn't even piss himself.

I was offered this stark choice, when I didn't think I would have any. Catheter? Or megadose of valium?

Easy,no?

I took the valium, and for the only time in my hospital stay, I was happy. The old men dying and ejecting breathing aids were forgotten...the nurses complaining about bed wetting patients, my own vomiting, all gone. Afternoon drifted by in haze, march sun drifting across the curiously barred window.

And as it passed into shadow, the problem was resolved

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 12.04.14

Splice - A Cronenberg Movie Like Cronenberg Used to Make

Although I have it on DVD, I haven't seen Splice in a while, so it was a pleasure to watch science out of control versus people, interspersed with watching out of control people versus science.

The documentary about the woman who tried to block life saving radiotherapy for her son "Neon" because she wanted to use crazed alternative therapies instead, was on Channel 4 and was equally compelling viewing.

Splice itself, directed by Vicenzo Natali who had showed what could be done with a one room set and a ton of imagination in "Cube" is another spin on the Frankenstein story, with scientists starting off with good intentions corrupted by the scope of their breakthrough. Their creation in this case being a doe eyed, model faced, bunny legged creature called "Dren".

Which always makes me giggle, "dren" meaning "crap" in Farscape speak.

Dren's creators, an ambitious and ever watchable Sarah Polley, and a geeky Adrian Brody, are forced to take their creation to a remote farm after the launch of a previous gene splicing experiment goes bloodily wrong at a media event. And here their attempts to get to Dren to express her human, feminine side over the rest of her varied animal componentry go disastrously wrong after when she seduces Brody, and kills her pet cat to boot.

And after that, things get seriously weird when we throw some transgendering into the ring, and a rape scene that disturbs more than Straw Dogs ever did.

"Splice" is essentially a Cronenberg body horror type movie, taking elements from "The Fly" and mixing in some "Jurassic Park" as well as Dren's genetics fly out of the control of her maker's. Some of the music is even reminiscent of Howard Shore's Cronenberg scores. It ought to be a B movie, by a director who has never really made it to the A's, but the performances of Polley, Brody, and in particular that of Delphine Chaneac as the disturbingly attractive Dren, make it rather more than that.

And it's a story which in a world where our drive for genetically improved food, drugs, and indeed children becomes more urgent, really resonates.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 14/08/2013